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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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https://archive.ph/IHPLW

Tim Walz isn't seeking reelection.

It's been interesting watching the reaction in my various social circles as this plays out. It seems like it's rapidly coalescing into two distinct narratives depending on tribal alliance:

  1. Walz is hoping to get out of the spotlight before he's indicted in connection to the fraud scandal
  2. Walz fears for his life because insane ultra-MAGA instigators are trying to ruin him.

I don't know if either are actually true, but it's an interesting thing to watch develop in real time.

New Nick Shirley video just dropped and it's a banger: https://youtube.com/watch?v=LmIrwjKQQKc

This one is a long-form, extended interview with David, the older man from the previous video. Apparently he's been investigating this stuff for years, rather obsessively, to the point where he's lost friends and family because they just think he's some sort of crazy racist person for investigating.

It's a bit long and meandering, so it's hard to keep track of all the claims made in it. I think we'll need time to process this and investigate further. I'd like to see this written in text with sources, instead of just a long interview. But among the claims made:

  • That this is all organized by Somali gangs, with the gang leaders bringing retribution on any family that doesn't go along with it. Investigators like David also get threatened with violence.
  • Widespread voter fraud from families living in collective housing. One person collects the ballots, "vouches" for all the people living there with no proof, and then returns a massive ballot stack all voting the same way.
  • "This is the worst fraud in human history." He estimates that a total of $80-100 billion was stolen by fraud in Minnesota
  • "However bad you imagine it is, it's worse. He alledges that basically every social program in Minnesota is now heavily corrupted by fraud. Some of the biggest are schools that might have 10 students, but pretending to get 100 or more so that they can get massive amounts of state funding. Medical services do the same.
  • This is all protected by the government and judicial system of Minnesota. At one point, David did the work to prove that a Somali leader did $7.2 million of fraud. He was convicted unanimously by a jury, but the judge overturned the verdict and left him free to continue collecting more money. The judges are elected, probably with the help of fraudalent Somali votes.
  • This isn't just state money, it's also federal money. This increases the scale, but also increases the severity of the crimes.
  • That Somalians routinely travel back to Somali, taking large amounts of cash with them (well over the TSA limit of $10,000), and for some reason the TSA grants them an exception to this when any normal American would be arrested or stopped for questioning.

So... will this lead to anything further? Tim Walz already said he won't run for reelection, but at this point I no longer think that's enough. The feds need to come purge the entire state government of Minnesota on charges of racketeering and voter fraud.

I did a lot of digging in Washington State daycares the other week. Washington has better public-facing financial tools. There is a big database of all government payouts for the last 6 months. You can go down the list of DYCF payments, stop at every company with “Home Daycare” or “Family Child Care” in their name that gets a 5-figure payout each month, cross-reference the name with the Washington State Daycare registry, and see that every single one has a Somali name as the primary contact. I must have found at least a dozen places run out of a medium-sized suburban home licensed for 12 kids that were each raking in $40,000 a month. Even assuming these were legitimate businesses running at full capacity, that would be over $3000 per child per month, for daycare, run out of someone’s basement.

You can see the base payment rates for Licensed Centers from Washington's Working Connections Child Care here. Depending on exactly where you are (region map) that 40k is very possible. If you took care of 12 infants (<1 year old) for a full day, for 30 days, in King County, the state would pay you ~$41k for that month. The rates are fairly similar for licensed family homes. You can also get an increase above those base rates if your childcare entity is part of the Early Achievers program. Family Home and Center EA rates.

I'm confused. I have a friend that put his kid in one of these suburban daycares (it's legit) and as far as I'm aware it's costing him thousands per month. I looked it up and they are also getting thousands per kid from the government. I know childcare is expensive, but it's not double dip into government's pocket and regular person's pocket for something like $5k total per kid expensive, so what's going on?

At 20/days/month and 8/hrs/day, that comes out to about... $31.25/hr per kid.

I'm realizing that I genuinely have no idea what a price is for childcare.

Is that high or low?

Seems extremely high to me. Daycare for our toddler is $90 a day, and that isn’t some ghetto “Learing Center” full of Somalians either, which I expect would be substantially cheaper.

Which is about $1900 a month, and babies are more expensive than toddlers. Seems entirely consistent with the other numbers we are seeing.